'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Israelis, mainly peaceniks, Pt. 3: Moshe Ma'oz

Moshe Ma’oz is a veteran Israeli peacenik and a retired prof of Middle East Studies at Hebrew University who has done a lot of great research and writing on Syria.  Jewish Israelis are often very wary of agreeing to come to meetings in East Jerusalem.  As Benny Morris once told me: “It’s simply because we don’t know our way around here; we come here so rarely.” Ma’oz, to his credit, was happy to come over to the little hotel I was staying in there—I think I’d told him about the attractions of its restaurant; plus, crucially, he seemed to know where it was.

But on March 3, as the time for our meeting approached even he was defeated by the horrible parking situation, so he called and asked if we could meet at the American Colony instead.

For those who don’t know it, the AC is named after a group of quixotic Presbyterian utopians from Chicago who made their way to Jerusalem in 1881 with the aim of setting up a utopian colony dedicated to various good works.  They attracted many participants from both the US and Sweden, and eventually ended up in a beautiful, courtyarded old home outside the Old City's walls to the north, in the neighborhood known as Sheikh Jarrah after a famous local mosque.  At some point, the colony had declined to the point that the remaining members of it decided to turn the beautiful old house and a couple of others the colony owned beside it into a hotel. One of the colony’s last surviving members/descendants, Val Vester, lived in a cool basement apartment there till her death a couple of years ago.

Back in the 1980s  before the hotel’s Swiss management company jacked up the prices quite inordinately, they used to always keep a few rooms at low rates for visiting journalists and researchers, and my husband and I often stayed there.  Sometimes we would go and visit with Mrs. Vester and hear all her great stories about the old days.

Also in the 1980s, the AC was one of the places where George Shultz or other visiting American dignitaries would visit Palestinian leaders like Faisal Husseini or Hanan Ashrawi. Those were “the good old days”—before the Israelis started to completely prohibit any Palestinian political activity in Jerusalem at all. (That came with Oslo.)

Anyway, if you can spring for the price of two cups of coffee, it’s still a pleasant place to sit and do an interview with someone. The internal courtyard is truly lovely—planted with orange trees, vines, and flowers.  But it was ways too cold for us to sit there, so I would plant myself and my interviewee in one of the lounges, instead.

When Ma’oz walked in, he was pretty depressed, but he expressed it in his usual friendly and half-joking (maybe?) way:

Helena, I am so depressed! Do you think Denmark has room for six million Jews? There is no future for us here! … Honestly, I am ashamed to be an Israeli.

The main message he wanted to convey was this:

Obama has to act! He has to work fast to build consensus around the two-state solution. He has to work strongly with those in Israel who still want the two-state solution who are still, on paper, a majority… He has to combat the gang around Bibi Netanyahu.

He grew very serious, saying he thought it was true—and very problematic-- that most of the Israelis who want what they call a two-state solution,

still don’t want to give up East Jerusalem or the Jordan Valley—and without having East Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestinian state there will be no peace with the Arab and Muslim worlds.

“Jerusalem is the key!” he said, a number of times.

He said that one of the main things preventing Jewish Israelis from accepting the idea of a Palestinian state was the fear that Hamas might take over this state,

and then Hamas would threaten the whole country, including Lod [Ben Gurion] airport.

I can understand that fear. But the Palestinian state could be demilitarized: they are ready for this.

I asked if he thought it would be possible for any Israeli government to even consider trying to evacuate the nearly 500,000 settlers who are now in the West Bank (including east Jerusalem).

He said,

Some people say it could lead to civil war. And it’s true that in the IDF’s combat units you now have a growing number of religious officers.

We need good leadership in Israel!  In the context of a peace agreement, we can do a one-for-one land swap with the Palestinian state, and that would bring the areas holding 80% of the settlers into  Israel. You’d have to give the rest the opportunity to stay where they are under Palestinian sovereignty.

But don’t even dream of dismantling the settlements of East Jerusalem, the ones that they call neighborhoods.

… You know, the majority of Israelis who favor a two-state solution do so because they hate Palestinians, not because they love them.

He was completely clear that the ongoing building of new settlements has to stop:

Those settlements at Ariel and in and around Hebron—what on earth are they doing so deep in to the Palestinian areas?

He recalled that after the 1994 massacre in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, when the Kahanist settler activist Baruch Goldstein used his automatic weapon to slaughter 29 Muslim Hebronites who were praying there, he had been one of those specialists who had urged prime minister Rabin to take that opportunity to pull all the Jewish settlers out of downtown Hebron. “But he listened to Ehud Sprinzak instead,” he said dolefully. “Imagine how much easier the Hebron situation would be if we didn’t have all those settlers there now.”